Originally Posted by Burress
You can't trust a thing you see in a demo, I think Bethesda showing off Oblivion AI made that abundantly clear.

I don't think the state of the art ever advanced significantly from the original Gothic game back in 2001. It did everything you see in Skyrim, people had a job, looked like they were doing it, and went to bed at night. They responded to threats and went about scripted sequences.

If you are waiting for real lifelike AI in a video game, and not a decent illusion, you won't see it in this lifetime. They can keep scripting more and more actions and responses, but at some point it will hit an uncanny valley effect and just be so short of the real thing it wasn't worth doing.

We just hit the point where an AI can get away as being a 13 year old second language english speaker to a relatively naive interrogator 30% of the time. That isn't Turing's vision there.

True, and open world and Sim games tried to improve on the AI. But I think that one should remember that Gothic, Witcher .. etc. are role playing games with a story to tell with start and and end, especially the Witcher.

Therefore the priority and focus is on the story and providing an enjoyable ride through this story; the NPC AI and behaviour is just for atmosphere and to produce a belivable setting - hence scripting. Anything beyond scripting would be a waste of computing and resource power for a good rpg.